


Full House Tonight

by Vulgarweed



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Larry Townsend
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BDSM, Biting, Blood, Bondage, Bottom Sherlock Holmes, Breathplay, Choking, Cock & Ball Torture, Diogenes Club, Diogenes Club is a BDSM Dungeon, Dom/sub, Emotional reunion, Exhibitionism, Face Slapping, Flogging, Hurt/Comfort, Leather, M/M, Mention of Past Holmescest, Past John Watson/Others, Past Sherlock Holmes/Others, Post-Reichenbach, Public Sex, Rough Kissing, Rough Sex, The Empty House, Top John Watson, Voyeurism, Whipping, collaring, mention of past incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 11:12:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12298050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: Fix-It fic for Larry Townsend'sThe Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Three years after witnessing the nude-gladiatorial waterfall death of his beloved Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime and the Caligula of London (and after ending his sad liasion with Moriarty's last rentboy Friedl), Dr. Watson receives an invitation to return once more to the legendary hardcore sex club the Diogenes. What could the reason be? What would the voyeuristic leather-master Mycroft Holmes possibly want with his brother's grieving widower? Could it have something to do with the Ron Adair murder?Larry Townsend ended his 1971 porn pastiche with his version of "The Final Problem" and never wrote a version of the "Empty House" reunion. This is my pale attempt to imagine what that might have been like. Townsend had a style that was both luridly pornographic and passionately emotional - I tried to do it justice.Also a fill forthis prompt at Sherlock Kink Meme!Huge thanks to my betaIwantthatcoat!





	Full House Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> RACK, not SCC. BDSM fantasy fic, not a how-to manual.

It was in the spring of 1894 when all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the legendary and much-loved young man-about-town Honourable Ron Adair under the most unusual and obscene and inexplicable circumstances. The public had already learned those details of the crime which came out in the public investigation, but a good deal was suppressed. Yes, even more than usual. Only now, and in this very private accounting, am I able to set down all the links of this remarkable chain.

The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life. Even now, after this long interval, I find myself thrilling as I think of it, and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement, and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind. Not only did all the events of this astounding case rouse my intellectual curiosity and my excitement in danger, but they brought me to new heights of erotic daring and - most important of all - utterly healed the most grievous wound ever sustained by my heart.

If you have read this secret account in the order of events, you must already know of the terrible day when my world came crashing down around me in the most deadly and beautiful of settings in the Swiss Alps. You must know that I inherited a lover from my own beloved’s murderer, and young Friedl and I comforted one another in our abjectness of grief for our respective mates - who, we believed, lay for all time with bones entangled beneath the brutal whitewater of Reichenbach - until that was no longer bond enough to sustain us. 

At last I sent him on his way with my good will, secure in the knowledge that I had at least taught him the love of a kinder man. To the rapacious pimp and criminal mastermind Moriarty, Friedl had been more slave than partner, and well acquainted was I with the cruel marks that he had left. Yet, for all the violence done to Friedl’s body, I still nursed and begrudged most the way his old master had murdered my heart. I made cursory attempts to understand Friedl’s mourning - yet in my deepest soul I could not accept the depths of his grief, for I clung to my own bitter widowhood, and remained convinced (as I am to this day) that Friedl was better off free of Moriarty. Yet for me the prospect of life without Holmes remained bleak even with Friedl’s sweet touch.

Such a fool I - had I given the matter more thought, I might have suspected young Friedl had another reason to put up so little resistance to the parting of our ways. But I was still trusting of him, and not ever as well-versed in reading the patterns of behavior in the rats of London as my lost love had been.

Friedl and I had shared the old rooms in Baker Street - and yet after he was gone, I noted with some puzzlement that my rent cheques were not cashed, until that grand ribald old queen Mrs Hudson, aka Violetta, swept in one day to inform me that the rooms were to be maintained as they were indefinitely, by order of Mycroft Holmes. This seemed an odd stroke of luck, for I hadn’t thought I had made much of an impression upon that burly, massive mountain of voyeurism. But it was clear that he was dearly fond of his late brother, and no doubt intended to keep these rooms in their state as a monument to him. I was probably as much part of the shrine as Holmes’s pipes and violin and library and dressing gowns, all of which remained exactly where they were when he had last touched them. I was content to accept this. After Friedl was gone, I spent my days writing endless reams of papers that wound up in the fire, and my nights wandering Holmes’s wardrobe trawling for the last of the scent of him.

 

***

A tall, thin man with coloured glasses, some sort of self-proclaimed detective, was holding forth on his theories of the Adair matter, all of which I found absurd, and I withdrew from the little crowd in disgust. As I backed away, I happened to strike against an elderly, deformed man behind me, knocking several of his precious books out of his hand. I picked them up, and observed the titles and the prurient nature of all of them: The Origin of Phallus Worship. British Bawds. Catullus. The Holy Wad. I endeavoured to apologise, but the man snarled at me and half-spit, though I didn’t miss his attempt to hump and fondle a little bit between my legs as he did so, and I was disgusted by his presumption. He gave a contemptuous grope of his filthy crotch and limped angrily away down the pavement. I did not notice until he’d turned the corner that he had pressed a small, vile-smelling volume into the pocket of my waistcoat.

I do not remember the title of the crude pornographic book, or much beyond the childish drawings of depraved acts and barely-legible typesetting. All I recall now is the card that fell from between the pages:

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT THE DIOGENES CLUB AT HALF SIX.

Coincidence, surely. There was no way this poor wretch of the streets could have known what the Diogenes Club was to anyone, much less its terrible personal significance to me.

Yet I knew that my rent was paid at the sufferance of the master of that queerest of queer clubs, and if I did appear at the appointed hour to satisfy my curiosity, I might not be turned away as long as I was willing to observe the rules.

It was a silly fancy. Most certainly the card belonged to a previous owner of the book, dated long ago, and if I appeared at the club, I would have to face the imposing Mycroft for the first time since I had my own Holmes alive still. It could go hard on me, especially if I were to be ridiculed, as seemed likely. 

I cannot say what imp of the perverse drove me on. Not for the first time, I considered the possibility that even if this were no secret offer of information (perhaps the elder Holmes was also following the Adair case with interest? Perhaps in memory of his brother he had some news he deigned to share with me?), the nature of the Diogenes Club was such that a man might find relief from spiritual pain in willing submission to the physical. It was only an idle fancy, but thoughts of it made me giddy and stiffening. Yet something had always prevented me. The Diogenes, it seemed, was for solitary men - but not for lonely ones.

***

I do not know if the piercing stares of judgment were real or only in my imagination, but I did not wholly imagine the scrutiny the burly guardsmen, impeccably dressed, gave to me as I presented my invitation. To my relief and no little wonder, the message seemed legitimate. Anticipation began to rise in me, with a bracing thrill of fear. Those combined emotions set my prick to rise, and this reaction did not go unnoticed.

Although I enjoy the occasional night at many gentlemen’s clubs, the Diogenes is such a legendary establishment I find it nearly impossible to feel at ease there - maybe because I had only been there under extraordinary circumstances. The dark entrance hall and luxurious front room, where street clothes are still allowed although frowned upon, were a mild enough place to orient myself and plan to find out to what end I had been invited. Even here, I was distracted by beautiful youths and strapping musclemen, all in various stages of undress or fancy dress, some barely contained in artfully arranged straps and harnesses of leather that served mostly to draw the eye to what they claimed to conceal.

As always, I was also the subject of appreciative gazes and not terribly subtle touches and gropings. Many men let me know with their eyes they would not be averse to going downstairs with me, or to one of the other rooms where at least making noises was not forbidden. The crowd was dense tonight, and my senses - sharpened by military service and long association with the greatest detective who ever lived - picked up on a charge of energy in the room, a sense of anticipation. This was not just the regular evening crowd. There was a special entertainment planned. Using my crude imitation of Holmes’s methods, I deduced that most of the men in the room knew they were to expect something exciting, but they did not know precisely what that was. Regardless of the trepidation in my mind, my cock now seemed determined to see it through.

In the Strangers’ Room I got a bit of a shock, and this one less pleasant - there was that very deformed old bookseller in his rags, completely incongruous surrounded by handsome and sophisticated gentlemen of the highest orders and the rawest desires. Yet I felt almost protective of him now, even as I was furious and not a little worried - had he followed me? What ridiculous fancy or perverse hope had led him to attach himself to me? One act of grudging kindness, and now I was to have a shadow trailing me in hopes of a hot meal or a quick fuck or both?

Most of all, did he know the most important rules of the Diogenes Club? It seemed unlikely.

We were in the common room where silence is law, and to speak here is to volunteer oneself as subject in the lower levels. Though this wretched person would not appeal to the aesthetic sense of the Diogenes clientele, I doubted that his ugliness alone would spare him their torments. So shocked and concerned was I that I nearly forgot myself and called out to him to leave, but I clenched the sounds back down in my throat at the last possible moment.

Imagine my horror when the old man spoke instead. He cracked open his precious volume of Catullus. _“O what is more blessed than cares freed / when the mind puts down its burden / And we tired from foreign labour come / To our hearth and rest in a longed-for bed?”_ His high, sonorous voice made him the object of every stare in the room - and then the crowd parted from the upper staircase. From the size and dominance of the man approaching, I knew it could be none other than Mycroft Holmes. My heart began to hammer in my chest. 

Mycroft was a giant of a man, as muscular and massive as his brother had been slender and agile - yet the keen intelligence of his grey eyes was so like that of his sibling that I felt a sick sensation in my chest, to feel an approximation of that gaze again. As was his habit when in his club, Mycroft wore very little except leather straps that accentuated his physique, and a leather codpiece that only advertised his shocking proportions. The crowd parted for him, reverently, with a murmur of dread and excitement as he approached the pathetic man who had broken the Diogenes Club’s foremost rule in such a fashion. I wanted to intercede for mercy, for surely this wretch of the streets would have no appreciation of the rarefied pleasure to be found in the cruel treatment he was doubtless about to receive. Yet I was still mindful of having been summoned here for a reason.

With my heart thrumming in my chest, I followed as Mycroft grabbed the unfortunate by his collar and marched him down the stairs to the dungeon. I watched as he was lifted by two powerful, cruel-faced Roman gods in leather and pinned to a wicked rack. Yet as they began to strip him naked and chain him and collar him, I read little if any true fear in his rheumy eyes, and I caught a moment’s whim of grim amusement flicker across the imperious face of Mycroft Holmes, the emperor in this brutal Pagan tableau. Although the book had long fallen from the poor street-hawker’s hand, he lifted his chin and with a manner almost proud, and he looked at me. _“O Jupiter, how often you rubbed your eyes with your hand! What such a god has changed you? Can it be because lovers do not want to be away from a dear body? And then you offered me, not without the blood of a bull, to all of the gods in return for your sweet husband.”_

His words flashed through me and cut deep. For I had been ‘married’ several times, in the fashion of men of our sort - dear Jeffrey, who affected women’s dress to maintain our social position, and was my refuge from the storminess of Holmes, and then again abandoned as soon as Holmes needed me; poor Friedl, consolation prize for our mutual heartbreaks after the geniuses we both loved had finished each other in that alpine cataract. But for me there was only one man for whom I would sacrifice anything and anyone to see once more. To all the gods, in return for my sweet husband, there was no blood I would not shed.

And the man chained before me, now naked and hardening in anticipation, chanting the words of a long-dead Roman poet (vicious wit, lover of both women and men) was _he._

The last of the old beggar lay on the floor, all theater-paste and false hair, crumpled up with the old clothes. 

Bound to the rack was the body I had worshipped for years, exact in every crease and mole and hair (yet with some scars I did not remember) and gazing at me was the face that never left my thoughts, no matter who else I tried to bury myself in to forget him. I shut my eyes against the memories, and when I opened them again, Sherlock Holmes was still naked and bound mere yards from me, across the dungeon, a look of insouciant joy just bubbling beneath a false stoic stare upon his face.

Time slowed and then stopped. In seconds I relived years of nearly-nightly cruel dreams, in which I experienced the joy of learning my beloved was alive after all - only to pass back into nightmare upon waking. Holmes looked older than he had left me, and I knew he had experienced trials, and yet he was smiling. Soon, I was sure, I must wake from this sadistic joke to find myself widowed and bereft once again. And yet his eyes were hopeful and expectant, as if he dared to be real.

All eyes were upon me as I breathed, and swayed. I registered nothing except a sound like the roaring of the sea in my ears. I could not react as my hand was taken, and the leather-covered-wood handle of a sturdy cat o’-nine pressed into it, and my fingers curled back around it by some wise soul who recognised that I had not the wits to flex my own fingers in that moment. Certainly a grey mist swirled before my eyes, and then it turned red when I perceived that he was amused.

Somewhere in the short distance between him and myself, I became truly overwhelmed. I came back to consciousness on the unspeakably stained floor, in the embrace of one of the hard-muscled leather-soldiers, my collar loosened and the taste of brandy on my lips, the wicked whip still near my limp hand where it had fallen as I had fainted for the first and last time in my life.

“My dear Watson,” Holmes finally said to me, straining at his bonds in a way that accentuated every lean strong sinew of him. “I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea you would be so affected.”

So affected. No idea. In so few words he had condensed a storm of emotion raging inside me. I wanted to weep. I wanted to hug him to me and never let him go. I wanted to tear him to pieces. And the crowd of rough, horny men was watching intently, to bear witness to my chaotic heart overflowing. Now I understood the whip in my hand, and I grasped it with intent.

“Regretfully,” came the deep voice of Mycroft Holmes, though I perceived clearly that word was a lie, “My brother has broken the rule upstairs, and so must pay the price down here, like any other man who dared to break the silence. There is no one better positioned to punish him properly than you, Dr. Watson.”

I could tell by the obscene stretching of Mycroft’s already intimidating codpiece that this was a show he very much wanted to witness. I took note of this fact and filed it away, as I did the eager, predatory faces of the men crowding in around us. They were merely background images in a landscape, blurring away in my mind as I advanced upon _my_ Holmes.

I could barely speak at first, but the words came easier once I had started. “Three years I’ve mourned you. Three years I’ve been half-dead myself. I saw you - I saw you and Moriarty wrestling naked at the edge of the abyss, the hopeless despair of it, the way you clung to him. I saw your mutual murder and your plunge to your watery tomb. All this time I have stumbled through the grey shadow of my joyless life without so much as a grave to visit, and you - you were alive all this time!”

“I have been traveling, Watson,” he said, and a hateful smile played about his well-remembered lips. “With my most vindictive enemies aside from Moriarty himself still at large, I thought it best to see the world and avoid London lest I bring death to the door of the man I love most. I traveled to the Far East, and in Lhasa I learned the most advanced techniques of meditation, trading my prowess in other arts for the Wisdom of the Lama; I learned the exacting disciplines of Tantra, pushing my body and mind to the utmost limits and then going beyond, balanced for ages impaled upon the lingam of Shiva while the mysteries of the universe taunted me and at last opened. You may have heard of the adventures of a Norwegian sailor named Sigerson but you probably did not read of the strapping modern-day Vikings who both served him and made use of him. I have known the dancing boys and hashish-scented poets of Persia and sampled the most forbidden delights in the baths of the holy city at Mecca, and I have disguised myself as someone interested in coal-tar derivatives, whatever those may be, in the south of France shortly before I embarked on a steamer to America, and my adventures there could fuel a…Watson. My dear Watson.”

I bit my lip til it bled. The tails of the cruel cat-o-nine in my hand twitched and vibrated like the tails of the actual animal do, when they are impatient and hungry.

“I knew, of course,” Mycroft said. “He needed a confidante. He needed money.”

“With one telegram you could have ended my suffering,” I snarled. “Either one of you.”

“It was not my place,” said Mycroft archly, and I knew he was right. I advanced then upon my beloved, and saw the smug face he had worn to torment me drop away. Perhaps more than any other man, I know the faces of Sherlock Holmes - the true and the false, the overjoyed and the desolate, the treacherous and the pleading. In that moment I borrowed his gift of sight, and imagined that I saw him as if I were he, looking upon him. I saw grief and loss, I saw despair. I saw a death of hope, and I saw his sharp grey eyes (showing emotion lagging behind his thoughts), land with longing upon all my weapons - the whip in my hand, the cock between my legs, the gun in my coat - and I knew that he wanted me to do my worst upon him. 

That his fondest wish would be for me to avenge myself upon him in hours of pain and sex, and then take him back into my arms, hold him close and never let him go again, return to our old rooms in Baker Street, never to be parted again except by eventual unwilling death as the decades to come would wear away at our bodies.

That if he could not have that, his second choice would be for me to do as I wished to him in these rooms, even to end his life if that be my will - as long as all my attention was his. A glance at Mycroft suggested that the brothers had discussed this possibility, and Sherlock had reserved impunity for me.

If I were to do neither - to turn away and despise him - then I would be doing not only one man, but our entire age a disservice: I would break the spirit of the best and wisest man England had known in a hundred years or more. He would make not a single cry, in his pride. He would simply fade out of sight. He had his cocaine-bottle, he had his travels. Perhaps London would be the final resting place of yet one more rat-nibbled corpse, or it could be any number of cities. If I walked away now, I would never know.

If I did that, I would also destroy myself more thoroughly than any bullet or blade could ever do.

My choice was clear. “Work is the best antidote to sorrow, is it not?” I asked, in a shaky voice.

“I have always thought so,” Holmes said quietly. “It did eventually pall when I had to be parted from you for far too long.”

“You didn’t have to,” I snarled. “One word. One word and I would have been at your side. One word and I would have kept your secret.”

“It was not safe,” he said. “It still isn’t, not completely.”

“You bet your arse it isn’t,” I growled, and my voice sounded as though it came from somewhere or someone else.

I glanced around me just one more time at the pack of cruel and aroused men now watching us. I kept my face cold and impartial. I fancied they were like the bloodthirsty audiences in the Roman auditorium, waiting for the thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the Emperor, some not-small part of them hoping to witness a gruesome slaughter.

I was about to do that which should never be done in anger, and I was feeling the energetic power of love and rage flow through every sinew and vein, permeating the very air in my lungs. Holmes’s eyes looked to mine in a silent, pleading prayer - in his blasphemous nude cruciform pose, was he praying to be sacrificed or saved?

In the Diogenes Club, sometimes a lucky man can have both.

 

***

I wondered how many of the hungry, sweaty, slathering men now reaching into their trousers and pouches, standing around proudly nude and tugging openly at big alert members, had had my Holmes. I knew for a fact that the club’s master, his own brother, had done so on many occasions - Mycroft had too much decorum to speak of it, but Sherlock had boasted of it to me openly, how the two brothers had turned their prodigious appetites on each other in their isolated youth, teaching each other to become the master cocksmen they would both need to be. (And Sherlock still proclaimed the elder his superior, which his pride would never let him do were it less than true. Perhaps someday I might even allow myself to experience Mycroft if he’d have me, though I am not sure I could survive a partner more adept and vigorous than Holmes the younger.)

I wanted to give him to all of them tonight. I wanted to see him pounded savagely by man after man until he was a sobbing, leaking wreck - but I knew my own inner bull pup too well; if I were to allow that, I would also want to kill them all, and even the Diogenes has its limits of un-civilisation.

I advanced upon him until I could smell him - his sweat of arousal and no little fear, the scent of his hair pomade, his own indescribable and individual aroma that let my primal mind know that this was indeed my true mate returned to me, and I could yet let go of that last little fear that this was some cruel prank. I nearly unmanned myself in front of all of them when I briefly recalled how I had wept into his clothes, begging the last traces of his scent not to disperse for-ever. 

That could not endure. I tightened my hand about the whip-handle for a moment, and then I passed it to my weaker hand. 

My eyes traced the gaunt planes of his cheek in terrible love, before I reached out and slapped him - lightning-quick, forcefully, knocking his head to one side, leaving a red mark on that pale face I loved so well. His eyes, his twitching mouth - a mask of first shock, and then pain, and then profound relief.

That relief inflamed my passions further, for I knew what it meant - Holmes knew as well as I did myself, that if I touched him, he would have me. I seized his jaw and turned his face towards mine, and I kissed him until my teeth scraped his lips so hard I tasted his blood, and my mustache lathed and burned his soft skin. He moaned and surrendered to me, his body slumping lax in his bonds as his heroic prick filled still further and seemed to reach out for me. 

My hand tightened around his throat, and I squeezed until he involuntarily shuddered, and I could feel all his muscles tense in fear. I continued to kiss him, stealing his air almost to the very last - and then I released my hand and decorated the red indentations on his neck with licks and bites, feeling his chest expand and contract convulsively as he panted. I drew back my hand again and slapped him on the belly, nearly as hard as I had struck his face, low enough to feel the head of his straining prick bounce against the back of my hand as I withdrew.

“You will tell me how you did it,” I growled. I had to keep my words short, for my voice was breaking and I needed to be stern. “How you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss.”

“Easily enough,” he said, and his voice sounded far too calm and normal for my liking. I remembered the dangerous whip that I clutched like a lifeline, and I let him feel its lightest stroke across the top of his right thigh. He gave a little cry - in as much surprise and delight as pain, and I would fix that for him sure enough. “I was never in it.”

“I saw you!” I cried. “I saw you and Moriarty go over! I was there, Holmes!” I was horrified to think that my lack of observation might have led to a terrible error - if Holmes had deceived me for three years, I had allowed him to do so.

“An illusionist’s trick,” Holmes said. “I needed to disappear. I needed - oh!” he cried as the whip lightly nipped him again. It felt like hardly my own doing, for a weapon like that needs to feed when it comes so near to its prey.

Murmurs and groans from the men nearby reminded me of their presence, suggesting anticipation. There were low slapping sounds, flesh on flesh. “They want a show, Holmes,” I whispered to him. “One that is no illusion. I wouldn’t presume to try to fool these men. Remember Mr. Melas, Holmes.”

His cock grew impossibly harder. I gave it a harsh slap, and he cried out. “Remember what was done to him, and how hard we all were when he was forced to describe how Latimer impaled him, and he was forced to do the same to the helpless Kratides. Recall how he wanted penance so badly for Kratides' horrible death. Beginning of the end for us. You started to use your cocaine again. You tarted up and whored yourself until I could hardly stand to look at you. What were you running from? It doesn’t matter now.” I reached down the straining lines of his sinewy hips, trailing down to his inner thighs until his heavy bollocks dangled helpless in my hand, and I gave them a squeeze and a twist. I could feel the taut heat and desperation. He was trying to keep stoic for the onslaught that was to come, but he could not hold back a whimper, a gasping wheeze.

“No,” he said in a pleading tone. “It doesn’t matter now.”

For in bringing back those dreadful memories, I had to recall that I had left him. I had abandoned him to his self-destruction and taken up with another man; in selfishly saving myself, I had broken what was left of his heart. I could not take back that abandonment, anymore than he could take back his cruel ruse. Even as I dug my nails into his inner thigh to hear him draw breath sharply in pain, I also leaned in to nuzzle his ear and his neck in a gesture of naked tenderness, recalling now those many nights we had nested together like cats after we had exhausted each other. “They want to see me take revenge,” I muttered.

“Why do you think we arranged the meeting here?” he said, and once again his inappropriate chuckles inflamed me. The red curtain returned to my eyes blurred with a mist of tears. With a growl, I spun the chained harness to which he was bound, exposing his back to me. Whitened marks there drew my eye - they seemed long-healed, yet I knew they had not been there before he left me. “You’ve been flogged before,” I said.

“By a hand much less welcome than yours, dear Watson,” he said, his tone mocking. “Let’s see you do my enemies one better, if you love me.”

I could not dwell it how it pained me to imagine him abused by others. It was for the best that he provoked me - his mocking words, the manipulations of his brother, the men all around us eager for the show. His well-loved body, that I had never thought to touch again, stretched before me ripe for torment. I used my hands first, hard vicious slaps on his lovely buttocks that were even thinner than I remembered, though they jiggled ripely enough as he cried out and flexed his lean thighs, his spine arching as he twisted. The sight of the inviting cleft between, parting in his desperate writhings, filled my prick even fatter with memories of his tightness and heat. Holmes had more often been the penetrator in our early days - well-versed was I with the burning stretch of his giant cock taking me, and well did I love that, I would have been content with it, that and his luscious, devious mouth. 

But as he sank into his dark moods towards the end, sometimes he would plead for me to take him, as if only my prick inside him could keep him anchored to his body and to me, to nail him down to the land of the living. Oh, I was going to nail him indeed as a grand finale to his punishment.

I had seen terrible violence done to men’s flesh with the cat of the type I wielded, and I had no intention of pushing as far as I could. Surely Holmes would know that I could kill him painfully, and that I would not. Yet having been assigned to a role of discipliner from time to time in my army days, I knew something of the skill, and even the limited mobility of my old wound would not keep me from rewarding Holmes’s expectations.

I shoved his thighs together and landed my first lash across the backs of them, deceptively lightly. I need not strike him hard - the tails would do much of the evil work for me. He jerked and lurched, and turned to glimpse at me over his shoulder. I realised what I wanted - to see him from every angle - and I shouted out to the watching crowd, “Bring me one of those mirrors there. Yes, yes, you, with your hands in your britches, put it over there, try not to smear too much.” I could be quite authoritative when I wanted to be, for in that moment all my watchers had become the rogues of my regiment. 

There, now, in the greasy glass I could see the front of Holmes, watch his every response as clearly as the peanut gallery could. And though I generally tried to avoid the gaze of Mycroft, I lifted my head proudly to meet him this time, and nodded with respect to his approving command and his naked, unashamed desire. I finished opening my shirt and shrugged off my braces, and naked to the waist, I saluted with my whip. _My_ Holmes and I, my Sherlock bound and quivering, now we were as gladiators - but willing warriors, not slaves.

I brought the tails down across his quivering arse, with quite a bit more force - not enough to draw blood but enough to raise red lines quickly. I heard him gasp and slightly whimper, saw him bite his lip. “How many strokes?” I demanded. “How many is enough to pay for my grief?”

“H-how…many…” he murmured - thinking, buying time. He was already in a state of mind that slowed his momentous brain. Yet from the glimpse of his handsome face in the looking glass, I could see that his hooded eyes were clear. This was not the old stupor of his seven-percent-solution self-abuse. This was a rapture far more potent and pure. “Do you remember? How many steps in our old rooms, my dear?”

“Seventeen,” I said. “And you will scream for me on the one that creaks.”

He’d already had two. I thought seventeen was rather too many, but he was never one for half measures. I kept the first pair of paired strikes across his upper back light. He moaned and shivered. Watching him in the mirror might be ill-advised so early in the flogging - for the arch and flushes of his body, the pitiful writhing-forward of his fully stiff prick, told me all too much about how he enjoyed these touches of pain. But it also made him vulnerable to my eyes. The men watching were beginning to beat themselves off in greater numbers now, and some of them looked at my poor man with covetous eyes. The collective sight made me want to be tender and protective of Holmes prematurely.

It made me hasten to get to the good stuff, and so my next two alternating strokes against Holmes’s back were harder and faster than I’d planned, and he jerked and shouted. I was sure there were tears in his eyes, and small beads of blood in the cat-scratch. I gave him two more across his clenching arse, and covered up my own little sob in the sound of his. I wanted to give him a lash for every time I screamed his name, every night I woke up weeping, every time my heart rose and fell at the sight of a tall man in an Inverness cape. If I gave into that impulse I could kill him. 

Shaking, I walked around him again and lashed the front of his thighs. I gave him a light stripe across the belly, and his cock jerked and dripped. I advanced upon him, taking in every contortion, and took hold of his bollocks again, pulling downward slowly and watched his chest heaving and the muscles of his stomach quivering as he moaned. I grasped him as roughly as I dared, and then pushed my fingers back to press at his entrance. I pushed into him just a little, dry but for the light sweat in his crease, and his eyes closed up tight. I shoved and he yielded. I leaned forward and sank my teeth into his shoulder just at the side of his neck, tasting his salty sweat and his racing pulse. I wanted to taste his blood.

“Please,” he whispered as if he’d heard me.

“Please what?” I demanded, keeping the tails of the cat swirling lightly about his legs, barely enough to sting. 

“Harder,” he said, his voice breaking. “More.”

“Are you in any position to give me orders?” I snapped, and let the crack of the whip underline it. “How much more do you want, Holmes? Do you want me to let every man here take a turn? They’d like that.”

The corner of his mouth turned up, almost in a smile. “If I were feeling like my old self, I might agree to that,” he said. 

I twisted my fingers and let his most sensitive opening feel the bite of my nails. “I could beat you bloody. Throw you to them and walk away and never look back.”

“I’d accept that, if you did,” he said. “But I think that is not your real will.”

“You read me aright as always, damn you.” I yanked my fingers loose and stood away from him, staring him down, and then I slipped behind him again, watching thin lines of blood smear his back. He was gaunt and pale - he had not been living well recently, I took some comfort in that, though I could not stop loving him enough to also be saddened. I spent the last lashes on the parts of him best able to bear it, his delightful arse and thighs, reddening the tender skin so that my rough touch would burn and sting. I admired my handiwork and the dim applause of the distant-seeming crowd while he trembled and groped helplessly at his bonds. “You know I’m damned,” I said softly, for I did not wish to be overheard. I pulled him on his chains toward me and leaned over his shoulder, knowing the hair of my chest was tickling his fresh red lines. “Damned to love you. It was impossible for me to live in a world without you in it. The world could not bear such a wrong. So here you are, and as God is my witness I am never letting you go again. I want every man here to know you are mine.”

“Make me yours again, Watson,” he said. I raised my hand and held his throat, and his pulse fluttered like a bird in a cage. Streaks of sweat and tears trickled down his jaw to the side of my hand. “The first fuck I had while I was away was the worst, for that meant that the last man to touch me intimately was no longer you. But I had to clear away the fog of Moriarty. After that, it was easier. Never you, though, irreplaceable you.” His shoulders heaved and he struggled for breath. “Please, take me now. Use me. Fuck me. It’s all I ever wanted . . . Your claim on me. Please. _John.”_

His use of my Christian name nearly enraged me again, and then it seemed to break me open, that half-voiced gasp of intimacy. Once again he admitted he needed me. I let the whip drop from my hand to the floor. I could barely stand to leave the zone of his body heat to fetch one of the pots of grease so ubiquitous in these establishments. I caressed him and slapped his arse as he turned his sharp face around to watch me. His hooded grey eyes, dark with desire and rimmed with red, deep-shadowed beneath. 

I slicked my fingers and spread his arse, gazing down with hungry eyes upon his most intimate parts. He wriggled and presented himself to me, and I pushed two fingers within, more kindly than before, and he sighed, a low moan breaking free of his chest.

I looked around once at hungry faces, profane watchers. I know Mycroft Holmes was the imposing captain of a tight ship, where rum took a distant third in priorities to sodomy and the lash. I know this crowd must be vetted heavily, for all that they looked like dangerous dregs and degenerate whores. But there was no keeping some things behind closed doors and passwords forever - soon all the underworld of London would know that Sherlock Holmes was alive and that I was his lover. Danger would be at our door again, for I suspected his arrival in London now was not only motivated by sentiment. Then that moment of clarity left me, and I was again an animal driven only by raw instinct to claim my aroused, submissive mate. I coated my straining prick in grease, and at last gave it what it had hopelessly craved for so long - the tight velvet clench of Holmes’s passage around it, the sight of his lean back stretched out before me and his lean rump cushioning my thrusts, the man I loved moaning in delight to receive me, his spine rippling and writhing even as the sweaty press of my body agitated his whip-stripes.

When first we lived and loved in Baker Street in more innocent days, more often I was the one spreading for him, receiving him - oh, how I loved the challenging stretch of his length inside me, the rough delight when we fully fit - and he did not hesitate to be rough with me when he knew I wanted it. My throat still remembered the thrill of terror when he demonstrated exactly how Jefferson Hope had choked his victims to death, in our very first adventure together, taking me to my limit. I loved his imperious manner in taking me; I loved the masterful way he moved; I loved the moments when his stern mask broke and he lost himself in honest ecstasy - so many of the aspects of my dearest friend’s mercurial personality were expressed in our bed, and all over London and everywhere we found ourselves together with an illusion of privacy. 

So we were now, both of us in extremis, and the watching crowd be damned. My fingers dug into his hips as I pummeled him, and his tight hole clung to me on every stroke as if reluctant to let me go, even just to return again with a stronger thrust. I stung his fresh whip-scoring with the salt of my sweat and my tears. Helplessly his hands flailed at the leather cuffs and chains that held him in place, trying to find something to anchor him to this world. His thighs strained as he tried to spread them further than they were meant to go, to take as much of me as I had to give, and more. He felt thin but strong as he always had, wiry and agile - and utterly desperate. He made a terrible sound when I reached around his bucking hips and took hold of the base of his cock, holding him there tight enough to tamp down any crisis that might have been oncoming.

I heard a grunt of pleased approval from the audience - as expected, Mycroft was visibly enjoying the spectacle, brazenly stroking his massive instrument as he watched his brother flogged and fucked. What rough love did Mycroft show, setting up this event in such a way to wring maximum cruelty from me as I sought revenge not only for grief but humiliation. There was tender feeling there, for if Mycroft was the greater sexual adept of the two, he must have known that I would indeed _hurt_ Sherlock, oh yes I would and I did, though not nearly as much as he begged of me - but never _harm_ him. He would never entrust his brother to a man who did not appreciate that distinction.

At last I felt myself positioned ideally to thrust as hard as I liked, and at last my other hand left Holmes’s hip and plunged up his chest, pausing to pinch and pull at his nipples as he shuddered against me, on my way up to his neck. His throat fit perfectly into my hand, and I held him fixed there. My cock in his arse. His cock in one of my hands, and his life’s breath in the other. Traces of his blood on my chest from the stripes I had given his back. 

“John-“ he whispered before I started to close off his air.

“Sherlock,” I murmured, as I bit his neck and made him come.

My cock swelled and throbbed at his paroxysm, the feel of him coming undone around me, the deep keening wheeze as he fought for breath in the grip of my hand, the wet spatter of his seed upon the floor and the aroused gasps and cheers of the men around us. I filled him and filled him; I emptied myself into him for a tiny eternity, the longest climax I’ve ever had.

Yet I withdrew quickly when I felt his body go more limp than I’d expected; I realized that he had fainted from the intensity of our exertions - and perhaps, of our emotions. I barked at the men around us - I admit the Captain in me was back in force and I did not hesitate to pull rank - until my Holmes was safely lowered from his bondage and wrapped in a blanket in my arms, and at last swooning awake with his leather slave collar loosened and the taste of brandy in his mouth.

“I had no idea I would be so affected,” he murmured at last, his own mocking words at last turned into a sort of confession.

“The best and wisest man I have ever known is a ridiculous fool,” I said as I rubbed salve over his back. We almost had a cocoon of privacy now, as our performance had inflamed the denizens of the Diogenes enough that men were falling upon each other in pairs and trios and clusters, using all the cruel and devious devices that the club had to offer upon each other. The air smelled of sweat and spunk and piss, and leather and tobacco and whisky. Holmes the younger seemed almost in his element.

But not nearly so much so as Holmes the elder, who loomed over us now, completely unabashed at the massive bulges spilling out of the obscenely scanty leather pouch between his tree-trunk thighs. With an oily tenderness he reached down and stroked his hand once through Sherlock’s sweaty hair, as if to remind us both of his presence. He gave me a long stare that I did not flinch away from - he assessed me in so many ways with that gaze.

“The late Ron Adair was a member of this establishment,” he said. Was that a flash of human sorrow in his chill grey eyes? “I know why he died, and Sherlock and I both know the tracks of this hunter. He will stop at nothing to avenge Moriarty. You are taking on this mission, Captain Watson.”

There was not the slightest hint of an opportunity for disagreement in his flat declaration. There was no explicit threat against me and no clear promise of reward, yet even I could see myself on my knees before him under the right circumstances. But Mycroft did not need stick or carrot to make me agree to resume the dangerous position of Sherlock’s companion and bodyguard. Indeed, no force on earth would be able to pry me from his side now - I had craved no reward more than having him back, and could imagine no worse punishment than to lose him again.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a fascination with this 1971 book, and I wrote a long essay about it a couple of years ago, here: http://powers-of-expression.com/the-sexual-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes
> 
> As far as I know, it's the first published work to openly portray Holmes and Watson as lovers, and it is not the LEAST bit coy or coded. Townsend was a Los Angeles leatherman, an early gay rights activist, and the author of the gay BDSM classic guide The Leatherman's Handbook as well as a column for Drummer magazine and a number of smutty novels and stories. He was about as knowledgeable of the gay culture of his time as it was possible to be, and brought a vivid raw aesthetic to his Victorian-style pastiche. He knew his ACD canon too.
> 
> It's out of print and makes the rounds on Amazon at ridiculous collector prices. There's a PDF version circulating. If anyone with connections is reading this and thinks this would be an excellent work to get an ebook revival (with permission of the estate of Mr Townsend, who passed away in 2008), I would absolutely have to agree.


End file.
